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Windows & .NET Watch: Software's just a system for stuff

By Larry O'Brien

January 15, 2009 — (Page 1 of 2)
The great philosopher George Carlin recognized that “a house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it” and, further, “that’s all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff.” He may as well have been talking about software development.

Lately I’ve been wondering if this is not the defining characteristic of good software: stuff in the right place. At the line-by-line level, variables are limited in scope and initialized near their behavior. Functions are little piles of related stuff, functions are piled into larger piles (perhaps objects, perhaps libraries), and then you put a cover on it and call it a system.

Bad software is also a big pile of stuff, but all the stuff’s mixed up—a variable initialized over here is used over there and then never again, but it is left lying around in the pile; a function that does a whole bunch of stuff; my stuff and your stuff are in the same pile, so we can’t tell whose stuff it is; and so forth.

I remain a big fan of object-oriented programming, which does not have nearly the cachet it did a decade ago. When a client throws out a buzzword today, it’s much more likely to be “AJAX” or “Service-Oriented” or even “RIA” than it is to be “OOP.” Buzzwords come and go, but even among programmers today you’re more likely to hear “functional” rather than “object” approaches lauded.

While functional programming has much to contribute, it seems to me to fall short of object orientation in terms of keeping stuff in its place. Functional programming is nicely Spartan in how stuff is piled and how you move stuff (by making a pile of stuff). However, it seems to me that functional programming falls short in explaining how you organize larger piles.

I don’t use a lot of instance variables in my classes anymore; the functional approach of controlling state with parameters and return variables is generally clearer, easier to test, and beneficial in concurrent programming. But I very much value that classes create a natural order of places to keep and find stuff, and they become effective packages that I can use to make bigger piles of stuff.

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